Thursday, February 19, 2015

Into the Wilderness

My personal Lenten journey this year leads through a wilderness I’ve known but avoided for many years. Oh, I’ve taken brief day-hikes along its fringes; but never have ventured into the heart of it, and certainly not with the intention of spending forty days there!

I have a nephew who this month embarked on an ambitious effort to spend one year trying to experience what it means truly to follow Jesus. Almost three weeks into that pilgrimage he still is struggling to identify his approach. To some extent he toys with the idea of “doing” what Jesus did. For example, he plans to gather resources to feed 5,000 people.

At another level he faces the task, not so much of doing what Jesus did, but rather of being who Jesus was (is). He has chosen a mentor for each month during the year, all of whom represent a broad diversity of theological and faith perspectives. He plans to leave no stone unturned in his quest to know what it means truly to follow Jesus.

Following Jesus is also a foundation of my Lenten Journey, although mine is limited to forty days, and has a much tighter focus. The wilderness I contemplate is the diverse, apparently contradictory images of God presented in the Christian canon of Scripture (specifically the Christian Protestant canon).

Specifically, I want to address the apparent contradiction between the New Testament image of God as “Father” (actually, Jesus called God “Abba”, which is the familiar sense, like “Daddy,” or “Papa”—a loving, nurturing being), with the Old Testament image of a vengeful, spiteful, jealous warrior God (“Lord of Hosts”) who orders genocide on many occasions.

My primary resource for the journey is Derek Flood’s book, Disarming the Bible (Metanoia Books, 2014).  Flood describes three common historic approaches to resolving the apparent contradictions in Scripture.

1.       The Conservative/Fundamentalist approach, which places a premium upon defending the integrity of Scripture, sometimes at the expense of discerning its truth. Too often the defense of Scripture, while a noble intention, ends up being a defense of one’s own understanding of a specific text, which one assumes is the correct, indeed the only true understanding. In this approach it sometimes become necessary to advocate things we know are profoundly wrong in the attempt to defend the Bible.
2.      The Atheist approach, which maintains the conservative/fundamentalist approach to Scripture, but then abandons any semblance of faith altogether in an attempt to maintain some sense of moral integrity.
3.      The Liberal approach of denying the problem and simply whitewashing over the evidence. In this approach attention is directed away from the genocidal violence in Scripture, focusing instead on the mercy and social justice found in the teachings and examples of Jesus. Flood calls this approach “Cherry-Picking”, and defines it as picking out the sweet portions of Scripture and ignoring the difficult passages that seem utterly contradictory to the Gospel.

It is my expectation and my hope that Flood will further develop and critique each of the three approaches as he makes his case.

He calls for integrity in our approach, saying, “If we as progressives are going to reject violence and instead focus on mercy and social justice, then we need to have a developed interpretive[1] rationale for our reading which can stand its ground against a conservative reading that seeks to legitimize violence in God’s name. …Rather than justifying or whitewashing over the problem of violence in Scripture, we instead need to confront it, and do so from the inside, as an expression of a healthy faith.” (Kindle edition, Location 348)

Flood’s proposed approach is to discover (or hopefully rediscover) the “radical and surprising way Jesus read (Scripture).” Of course, there was no collected and canonized “Bible” at that time. There were, however, Scriptures—Holy Writ: The Torah, which is the first five “books” of what we call the Old Testament, was available in some form (whether that form had become standardized is open to question), as were some of the prophetic and wisdom writings.

We are warned at the outset that reading the Scriptures as Jesus did will not be a self-evident effort. Indeed, the way Jesus read Scripture “scandalized the religious authorities of Jesus’ time and is likely to be seen as equally subversive and ‘blasphemous’ by the religious gatekeepers today.” (Kindle edition, Location 362)

The wilderness is always intimidating; but that’s where The Adversary[2] is. The Adversary has been having its way with God’s people, dividing them over understandings of the very writings that should be uniting us. Jesus confronted The Adversary and prevailed. Will I? Will we? Will you go with me and hold my hand?

That’s the way I see it through the flawed glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,
Jim



[1] Flood uses the word “hermeneutical”. It’s academic and has many facets. One can find a broad treatment of hermeneutics on “Google.”
[2] The literal translation of the word that usually is transliterated (as opposed to translated) “satan.” It carries a sense of “the attorney for the other side”.

No comments:

Post a Comment